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Afternoon Links: Hacking the Data for Clicks, a Heck of a Pardon Request, and Michelle Obama’s Book

By Jim Swift

What’s in this week’s issue? Get a preview of our articles and features in this video from editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes:



Speaking of videos (who doesn’t love video!?), Andrew Egger is filling in for Mike Warren on the White House Watch beat. Check out his column and video preview of what we can expect… Until we can’t predict what to expect, that is. After all, this is the Trump White House.

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Michelle Obama is writing a book. Does that mean #shesrunning? Perhaps! As BuzzFeed reports, the book is slated to be “unusually intimate.”

Hack the data, go viral. Another worthwhile BuzzFeed read is about social scientist Brian Wansink and his viral studies about… eating. Turns out, the data was collected and a hypothesis was apparently created after the fact:

Ideally, statisticians say, researchers should set out to prove a specific hypothesis before a study begins. Wansink, in contrast, was retroactively creating hypotheses to fit data patterns that emerged after an experiment was over. Wansink couldn’t have known that his blog post would ignite a firestorm of criticism that now threatens the future of his three-decade career. Over the last 14 months, critics the world over have pored through more than 50 of his old studies and compiled “the Wansink Dossier,” a list of errors and inconsistencies that suggests he aggressively manipulated data. Cornell, after initially clearing him of misconduct, has opened an investigation. And he’s had five papers retracted and 14 corrected, the latest just this month.

You can be my hero, baby. You must listen to today’s episode of the Weekly Substandard. It’s about the evils of traffic cameras. But before you do that, watch this brief police video of a man angrily destroying a speed camera in Washington, D.C., set to to music of Enrique Iglesias.


A heck of a pardon request. Perhaps you’ve heard about Missouri Governor Eric Greitens. He was, briefly, a rising star in the GOP until…. this happened:

[members of] both parties have demanded that Greitens resign ever since KMOV in St. Louis published a covert recording by Greitens’s former hairstylist’s ex-husband. In it, the hairstylist is heard describing how Greitens invited her to his home in 2015 and, with her consent, taped her hands to exercise rings and blindfolded her. He then allegedly took a photo of her naked without her knowledge.

Yeah, this is horrible behavior. In a pre-Trump world, he would be probably be out of office, back when the party cared about family values (remember those times, so long ago?). Alas, Greitens is not going anywhere, despite the fact that he was indicted and arrested for a charge of invasion of privacy. In case you thought it couldn’t get worse: The Missouri GOP’s defense of Greitens opens with this conspiracy:”[St. Louis Circuit Attorney] Kim Gardner has received more than $200,000 from George Soros groups.”

OK then! And about that pardon request? The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

Former law student and male stripper prosecuted for invasion of privacy for secretly filming sex partners two decades ago is now seeking a pardon from Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, indicted under the same criminal statute last week. A letter sent Sunday to a lawyer for Greitens cites Greitens’ own motion to dismiss his case and his “published position on this statute,” and requests that the lawyer forward the request.

As the kids say, this is pretty epic trolling. His attorney says: “What’s good for the governor should be good for the gander.” Well, governor? What say you?

Save the date! Join us at the 2018 Weekly Standard Summit. This May 17-20 at the historic Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, join Stephen F. Hayes, Fred Barnes, and Michael Warren and special guests Bret Baier and A.B. Stoddard as they discuss the future of American politics. Book your tickets now.

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